120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
[Dr. Craig Evans earned his Ph.D. in New Testament from Claremont Graduate School and is the Director of the Graduate Program in Biblical Studies at Trinity Western University, where he has taught since 1981. He has lectured at Cambridge, Durham, and Oxford. Co-editor of Dictionary of New Testament Backgrounds, Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research and Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Author of Jesus and His Contemporaries.]
Dr. Craig Evans
1. The evidence about Jesus is better than we have for any other historical figure of his time.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Craig, Peter Jennings opened his special with these words. He says, "We suspected that reliable sources would be hard to come by" in terms of investigating Jesus. And they constantly hammered on the theme that there’s a lack of evidence concerning Jesus’ life. Is that true?
Dr. Craig Evans: Well, it depends on what you mean by that. There’s not a lack of evidence if you’re talking about ancient sources that tell us the important things that Jesus said and did. If you’re talking about stuff that’s of popular interest like, "How tall was Jesus?" Or, "What color was His hair or His eyes?" Yeah, we don’t have information about that. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is what He said, what He did, how He understood Himself, how He understood His mission–and we have plenty of reliable material for that.
Ankerberg: Compare the material that we have for Jesus with, say, of Caesar or any other historical figure of that time.
Evans: Well, it’s above average. We have more information about some of the Roman emperors, but for goodness’ sakes, what are we talking about? We’re talking about the Roman emperor and Jesus is in that same league. We have four biographies about Him and with some of the Caesars we have maybe one biography or maybe two; for some, nothing at all. So Jesus compares very favorably, never mind comparing against other, say, ordinary people. But compared the Roman Caesars, I think He compares rather well.
2. Ancient biographies often had a theological bias.
Ankerberg: Now some people would say the information we have is not historical biographies because the guys have so much theology in there. But say, compare that with Tiberius Caesar, the guys that wrote about him.
Evans: There’s theology in everything that’s written in antiquity. They don’t make that distinction—"Well, this is secular and this is theological". Everything is theological. The question for the Caesars was to what extent did the gods assist, help, inspire, guide, whatever, the Roman Caesar? So that same idea underlies any kind of biographical writing in late antiquity. And so just because the New Testament Gospel writers have a theological interest and that’s what drives them to tell the story of Jesus in the first place, that doesn’t disqualify their writing. It doesn’t make it suddenly unhistorical or of no value.
Ankerberg: Yeah. Give me some examples of ancient history where you have the same thing come up and yet no historians would throw that information out.
Evans: Well, there are all sorts of information from Suetonius and other ancient historians who talk about certain events in the lives of these Caesars as they grow up and historians normally accept that, unless it’s something really fantastic or strange this information is readily accepted. Historians of classical antiquity and history use the Gospels for information about what was going on in Palestine in this period of time. For some reason, biblical critics are highly skeptical, excessively so in many cases, and always approach with sort a hermeneutic of skepticism or hermeneutic of doubt when they approach the Gospels—and that’s strange, because historians of classical antiquity, they don’t do that.
3. The best place to find information about a person is to start with his contemporaries.
Ankerberg: All right, for a news reporter or a historian, let’s talk about, where does a person start when you want to find information about Jesus? What is the historical method? What’s accepted among the scholars?
Evans: Well, where you begin, you begin with your oldest sources, your oldest and most reliable sources. And we’ve got them. We have four Gospels in the New Testament. But there are other gospels and some people think, Well, what about the Gospel of Peter? Or what about the Gospel of Thomas? Or what about this source or that source? Well fine. Scholars who’ve studied them, they don’t compare very well. Their secondary, second century and later. And I think for good scholarly reasons, these gospels, by most scholars, are held in reserve and are not considered of primary importance as are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Ankerberg: All right, so if you go to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, a lot of the folks in the Jesus Seminar would say Matthew didn’t write Matthew; Mark didn’t write Mark; Luke didn’t write Luke and John didn’t write John. Okay? What do you say to those people?
Evans: Well, okay, again I think we’ve got a little too much skepticism going on here. The early Church believed that Matthew the Apostle wrote Matthew, and that a figure named John, possibly the Apostle John, wrote John. But the early Church says Mark and whose Mark wrote Mark. They didn’t say James or they didn’t say Peter. They didn’t come up with some apostle for Mark. What does that say? And they come up with Luke? Who’s he? Apart from his authorship of Luke, Acts, we don’t really know anything about Luke. He’s just a name in one of Paul’s letters. So why does the Church choose two non-apostolic authors of the Gospels? It’s because I think they are trying to be accurate and trying to remember who really did write these things anyway. So to me that’s a strong indication of the veracity of the Tradition. Matthew probably did have something to do with the Gospel of Matthew; and someone named John, possibly the Apostle John, had something to do with John. And Mark probably is the author of Mark and Luke probably the author of Luke. |
